HiFi Subjectivist ¦ Audio Forum ¦ NVA User Group

TheMadMick wrote: ↑Fri Nov 04, 2022 10:17 am

CN211276 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 04, 2022 9:47 am
A very good point. I can listen to my main system all day but not the second system. Both systems are the same brands, NVA, Chord and Sonore. Although they are at opposite ends of the ranges the sound signature is similar. It is upscaling which makes me want to listen for lengthy periods. I seem to recall that when CD replaced vinyl as my main source in the 90s I played less music. I am convinced that the 44kHz cap, which does not apply to vinyl with all its short comings, was a factor along with the novelty of satellite TV and the music scene taking a nose dive.

In my view 44.1 CD gets a bad press not because it is inherently poor but because the decoders and following circuitry don't get the best out of it. I rip my CDs to FLAC and the quality of most is outstanding. The poorer ones are usually as a result of poor performance poor poor recording.

Whilst I don't particularly like quoting Russ Andrews, his philosophy of getting the best out of what you've got seems sound to me (even if the prices are really silly).

Agree to an extent. Before I had the Mscaler FLAC rips and 44kHz streams sounded better than the CD player.

I rip my CDs to WAV - and notice a 'richer' sound than with FLAC. Using Volumio players I can then upsample to 192 KHz (if the streaming device has enough CPU capacity).

Although I can hardly hear a difference between the CXC CD transport and the Volumio PC with both running via Denafrips Ares II DAC.

savvypaul wrote: ↑Fri Nov 04, 2022 11:15 am

karatestu wrote: ↑Fri Nov 04, 2022 7:15 am What happened to the modded Marantz CDP ?

It doesn't power up. Mark will have a look at it next week. I t may be something simple. If not, it will have to go back to the original owner.

Shame. Hopefully it will be an internal fuse or wire come adrift.

I always wanted to hear one of these Lampizator doo dahs.

All it is is a valve output stage instead of an op amp one as far as i can see. i changed op amps on a couple of philips 1541 players, and recapped them completely. There is also the nos mod that can be done to the 1541. I like 1541 players, they are fun things to play with. The valve output stage is not rocket science it should be easy enought to fix

The anologue output stage is arguably the part which has the biggest impact on how a CDP will sound. Personally I find all the blather about certain dac chips very tiring.

My Naim CD3.5 was born with an output stage consisting of a seven pole Bessel filter with added bells, whistles and even the machine that goes "ping". You get the picture. Dozens of components including six opamps, polystyrene caps and shed loads of resistors. I had read about somebody (on perfect farming monthly) who had bypassed this output stage altogether as the dac chip only needs a simple single pole capacitor filter after it. It has enough balls to drive the next stage on its own, no buffer required.

In Naim worship land we throw as many power supplies in fancy boxes at these things as possible. The CD3.5 had the ability to be upgraded with an external psu to power the output stage (opamps). Ofc I threw a hicap at it and it sounded better. Then followed various diy regulators like the Avondale TPR4 ( tracking pre regulator thingy with capacitance multiplier tagged on the front) and ALW super duper regulators local to the opamps in the CDP.

Thing was all these 500VA transformers, cap banks , new devilry super regulators were completely redundant once I bypassed the seven pole bessel filter with opamp buffer tagged on the end. The dac chip with single pole capacitor filter after it completely trounced the bollox that Naim had thrown on the end. And I got to do away with two psu's and associated nonsense. Happy days.

Why have I written the above ? Can't remember. Oh yes. Richard was bang on the money in my book - keep it simple stupid. In my case I have always found it to be true. The music loves me.